Some musings on De Bethune's introductions at Basel 2007

Some musings on De Bethune's introductions at Basel 2007
James Dowling

I first encountered De Bethune three years ago at Basel and was sufficiently impressed with them then that I declared them “The most interesting” of that year; if you are interested you can find my post here. I have kept an eye on them ever since, as I find their mixture of traditional styling & advanced technology to be genuinely exciting, so you can imagine my anticipation as I visited them this year. The real surprise was that along with their innovative technology, this year they have come up with some equally innovative designs based on the ‘Sport’ line introduced last year.

This year’s introduction is the Beat Quantieme, it uses their new automatic calibre, the DB 2024, which is without a doubt the most innovative movement I saw this year. Let me give you a couple of examples of the creative thinking involved; the rotor uses a platinum weight suspended on skeletonised titanium arms, this gives the rotor the maximum impetus at the rim (where it needs it) and the minimum weight at the centre (again the desired solution) and the skeletonised arms act as shock absorbers, allowing some flex and thereby preventing damage to the centre pivot of the rotor.

Then, take a look at the balance structure; in the last few years many companies have abandoned the conventional balance cock in favour of the balance bridge. But only de Bethune have gone further and made the balance bridge an integral part of the shock protection system of the watch; the actual balance bridge is the grey skeletonised open ‘V’ in the image above; this secures a titanium secondary bridge in which the balance staff actually evolves. As all of these 3 components are individually mounted, this gives the balance 3 levels of shock protection and makes the movement one of the most durable on the market.

Then look at the balance itself, not your conventional one; not at all, there is no circumferential wheel, instead (like John Arnold’s ‘Z’ Balance from 200 years ago) it is reduced to the bare minimum, there are 4 egg shaped weights made from platinum suspended at the ends of thin titanium arms. The logic behind all this is beautiful in its simplicity, platinum is used for the weights as it is incredibly dense and so provides maximum mass, the weights are egg shaped because this gives an aerodynamic shape with a perfect inertia/mass ratio. Not immediately visible in the image is the balance spring material, this is made entirely from silicon; De Bethune are currently the only manufacturer making their own silicon balance springs in production quantities.

Speaking of being self sufficient, they not only make their own balance springs, but they also make the complete balance, and the rest of the movement; to say nothing of the case, hands and dials. In fact, I think it correct to call De Bethune the most independent watchmaker in Switzerland at the moment, as far as I can surmise; only Seiko in Japan can approach their level of self sufficiency.

One of the things that always attracted me to the company was that despite their watches being quite large (between 43 and 45mm) they were always slim enough to slip under a shirt cuff. But, as they were all manual wind dress watches, this was comparatively easy to do; but with automatic sport watches, this is much harder to achieve but they have. As always with DB, the methods of attaining this goal are a mixture of simple logic and ‘out of the box’ thinking. By making the rotor move around the periphery of the movement and attaching it to the winding gear by slim titanium arms, they have added almost nothing to the height of the movement. But the smartest idea is to make the rear of the dial the top plate of the movement; see the image here.

This has been done previously, but only in quartz movements; initially in the Delirium from Concord (still the thinnest watch in the world) and later much more successfully by Swatch in their eponymous (and ubiquitous) watch.

The case is almost as innovative, using white gold as the body and either Palladium or Titanium as the bezel material; it has anti reflection coated sapphire glass on both the dial and movement sides of the case. Despite using a sapphire back it is waterproof to 100m, and examples of the watch have been on actual dives to much greater depths. As their movements are not exactly 'ordinary' they have made the decision that that only authorised service centres will be able to open the watches, this is achieved by means of specially designed screw heads on the case back, which can only be opened by those with the correct tool.

The dial is as unusual as the rest of the watch, the main part of it being blued titanium with a pattern of perfect concentric circles, the hours are marked by blued titanium hemispheres inlaid into the bezel and the minutes by a perforated steel inner rim to the bezel. The central section of the dial is in steel with a stunning Geneva Stripe finish, at the top is the power reserve with 8 small vertical windows, the indicator changes from Red to Black as the power stored in the twin barrels increases. The hands are of a style I have never seen before and are designed and made in the factory from a mixture of both stainless and blued steel. About the only conventional thing about the watch is the dial aperture at 6.

At 45mm diameter and 11mm deep, the watch is about the new norm for a sports watch; that is to say it is bigger than a Submariner (although slimmer) and smaller than a Panerai. And whilst its styling will not appeal to everyone, in many ways that is a good thing as the company make less than 300 watches a year anyway, so it is unlikely that they will make more than a dozen or so of these this year. What I like about it is that it neither looks like anything else nor does it attempt to totally redefine the way you tell time (for example the Uhrwerk); and, whilst it advances the art of watch design forward a small amount, it advances the science of movement design and construction forward more than any other watch shown this year. In case you hadn’t figured it out by now; I liked it.